The Best Quotes from Tina Fey’s New Yorker Piece on Motherhood

Recently, the New Yorker has come under fire from feminists upset that the magazine features so few women. So, while it may just be a token gesture or an exception because she’s such a big name, we’re happy to see that one Tina Fey appears in this week’s issue — with an essay that will resonate with many women. In “Confessions of a Juggler” (behind a pay wall, but well worth throwing down for), Fey — whose book Bossypantscomes out April 5th — balances humor and cutting insight to broach the contentious issue of working motherhood and her own struggle to decide whether she wants another child. Make sure you read the entire piece at some point, but first allow us to whet your appetite with some of our favorite quotes.

“It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam — which, let me make it very clear, I have not done — than it is to speak honestly about [working moms].”

“‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.”

“All over Manhattan, large families have become a status symbol. Four beautiful children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying, ‘I can afford a four-bedroom apartment and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in elementary-school tuition fees each year. How you livin’?”

“There’s another great movie idea! ‘Baby Versus Work’: A hard-working baby looking for love (Kate Hudson) falls for a handsome pile of papers (Hugh Grant). I would play the ghost of a Victorian poetess who anachronistically tells Kate to ‘go for it.'”

“I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all ‘crazy.’ I have a suspicion — and hear me out, because this is a rough one — that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

“To hell with everybody! Maybe I’ll just wait until I’m fifty and give birth to a ball of fingers! ‘Merry Christmas from Tina, Jeff, Alice, and Ball of Fingers,’ the card will say. (‘Happy Holidays’ on the ones I send to my agents.)”

“Little kids’ birthdays in my neighborhood were simple affairs. Hot dogs, Hawaiian Punch, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, followed by cake and light vomiting. (Wieners, punch, and spinning into barfing would later be referred to as ‘the Paris Hilton.’)”